Optimizing performance has always been a hot topic. This post contains information on how to optimize your MSSQL backup performance with the Data Protector. As always, with this kind of advice, this MAY be helpful in most environments but is not a general solution for any environment. Please test any of the changes and consult your SQL Server administrator if you have any doubts.

General recommendations

Tuning using omnirc

Database integrity check

SQL backup compression

Parallel database backup

Multi-stream database backup

Parallel database and Multi-stream database backup for Microsoft SQL is available since Data Protector A.09.08.

Data Protector 10 features the new WebUI integrated in the Home context of the legacy MFC GUI. The WebUI in Data Protector A.10.03 includes the Dashboard, Telemetry, Scheduler, Missed Job Executions and Global Option Tuning. Did you know that it is possible to access the WebUI from outside the MFC GUI? The following quick guide demonstrates how to make it work.

Prepare a Web User

Connect to the MFC GUI. In the Users context select an existing user or create a new user. In A.10.03 and later each user also has a Web User Name based on the Name, Group and Domain. Select Reset Password for the user that should be used.

Starting with Oracle 12c three new administrative roles and users have been introduced to conform the principle of access to the least privilege. The users and roles named SYSBACKUP, SYSDG and SYSKM will be created when the database is created with their account in expired and locked status. SYSBACKUP is used to perform backup and recovery operations from either Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and or through SQL*Plus – you can see all privileges within the Oracle documentation.

If a Oracle 12c is detected on the client system, Data Protector A.10.01 and later now automatically uses sqlplus user/password@SID AS SYSBACKUP as the connection string to the database. As a result you may encounter the following backup issue after a Data Protector client or a Oracle database upgrade.

The Patch Bundle A.10.04 (Build 182) for Data Protector 10 has been released on May 22, 2018.

Data Protector A.10.03 was released as a full install therefore the cumulative patch 10.04 can only be installed on top of A.10.03. A direct upgrade from A.10.00, A.10.01 or A.10.02 is not possible!

It is recommended to install it on all Installation Servers (IS) and the Cell Managers (CM). Then push the new packages from the IS to all Data Protector client systems to get the latest fixes into effect.

This patch can also be installed locally on Windows Data Protector client systems. In this case only components that were locally installed on the client will be updated. Linux and UNIX clients still require an Installation Server while updated packages can be extracted from the Linux or UNIX Installation server manually.

Transitioning to the new Consolidated Scheduler, introduced with Data Protector A.10.00, can be a challenge. Especially when customized schedules have been used in the Legacy Scheduler to overcome former product limitations. A common example are manually modified schedule files to execute jobs at the last weekend of the month.

Data Protector A.10.03 improves the overall upgrade experience from previous versions such as 8.1x and 9.x. During the upgrade existing Legacy- and Advanced Scheduler schedules are migrated into the new Consolidated Scheduler. Once the upgrade is complete a summary is displayed by the installer. Details on schedule migration are logged into the file migration.log on the Cell Manager.

Successfully migrated schedule files (Legacy Scheduler) are kept in the corresponding directories on the Cell Manager but are renamed to SpecName.migrate. Empty schedule files are skipped. This allows manual modifications to any non-successfully migrated schedule files and re-run the schedule migration at a later point in time using omnidbutil -migrate_schedules.